#i just think armand would be obsessed for a hot minute

[apoptoses]

Food in Venice is heavily seafood dominated, being that the city is man-made islands on the sea with no growing space of their own

Red Lobster was founded in 1968 and thus was already an established chain seafood restaurant in the US in the 70s and 80s

Armand enjoys having secondhand experiences via Daniel and would likely want to re-experience food familiar to him (seafood) served in 'modern' popular styles

Ipso facto, how many times was Daniel subjected to endless shrimp at different Red Lobster locations before the fascination of seeing the exact same restaurant in different places wore off for Armand and how unwell does the mere scent of cocktail sauce now make Daniel feel?

[intervieweird]

CARAVAGGIOVAGABOND:

“ I UNDERSTAND YOU. ”

Daniel lays on the bed, four fingers of whiskey full, plied with a fifth of vodka and the stirrings of something frothy in his stomach. He figures he’s got enough booze fermenting in him to make a brewery.

He puts out his butt in the ash tray, burnt to the filter and bland as the scratch in his throat. Everything else in the room swims as he stirs; a blurred wave of neutral tone and unexpressive landscape paintings.

But not those eyes. Those eyes stay right where they are.

“Yeah?” He asks, pleasantly slurred and sluggish, moving his limbs mechanically on the bed to turn and face the creature watching him from the chair. He feels good now. Real good. Warm and tingling all the way to his toes, though the way his brain is having trouble keeping up with his eyes tells him he’s going to feel it in the morning. He just can’t mix his spirits like he used to. “And how’s that?”

caravaggiovagabond: @intervieweird cont. from [x]

The dimly lit, unspectacular hotel room isn’t exactly Armand’s usual preference, but currently he’s given little choice but to follow wherever his current obsession leads him. Tonight, that just so happens to be by his bedside, the young man lying charmingly inebriated across the bed.

To see Daniel in such a state is also not Armand’s preference – he would much rather that he was active, coherent, and fit enough to be dragged from pillar to post all over the globe. Those plans, however, are quite clearly foiled as it’s looking very much doubtful that Daniel will be able to travel even to the bathroom unassisted, never mind anywhere further afield. He dips into the mortal’s mind for just a moment, morbidly curious, but soon pulls away again, the dizzy, room-spinning stupor clouding his thoughts not at all a pleasant experience to him even secondhand.

With a sort of languid, animalistic grace, the vampire slips from the chair that he’s taken up residence in, half-crawling to the side of the bed where Daniel now faces him and crouching beside him at eye level, both arms folded on the mattress near the man’s face, his marble cheek resting against the thick, baggy sweater clothing his own forearm.

“Because we are kindred spirits,” he murmurs, cool, iron-scented breath a sigh against Daniel’s heated cheekbone, amber eyes fixed on him as one fingertip emerges from the cradle of his folded arms to prod at Daniel’s shoulder.

Armand is like a crooked creature, skewed limbs unfolding, too long. A monster. A monster crawling from under the bed and slipping under his skin like an itch. It’s a trick of the eyes, Daniel knows. Mortal eyes; eyes made of cells dying every second. He remembers what Louis told him once, how the undead moved too fast to process with the feeble chemical impulses of the human brain. Maybe it’s the old, primitive vestiges that are telling him to run, run, flight sparking in the dull grey matter, clogged with fatigue and poison.

But Daniel doesn’t run, and he wonders, distantly, why.

He turns towards death at his shoulder, a frown on his face as he fumbles for his glasses on the nightstand.

“Quit poking me.”

His vision blurs, sets, settling into a fixed image of that beautiful damned boy. Daniel peers at him, curious, and he wonders if Armand hears the catch in his throat, the fine movements of the muscles, the ache in his jaw as he feels it clench. “What makes you say that?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

“Don’t you feel it?”

The words are barely more than a whisper; seductive, addictive, persuasive, a gentle smile twisting the corners of the boy-demon’s mouth upwards at the other’s tense reserve and slurred reprimand. He stops, his fingertip resting only gently now against Daniel’s arm as though in rebellion, staking a silent claim.

“I feel it, Daniel. Your heart sings for me.”

Armand’s sharp fingertip is removed from his arm, slender hand sliding across the mortal’s prone chest to clutch the sheets on his far side, using them as leverage as the boyish frame pulls itself effortlessly upwards. He kneels beside Daniel on the mattress, leaning over him until tangled, auburn curls almost brush his cheek, staring down at him with that frighteningly preternatural, chestnut gaze as though he’s the most fascinating specimen of human life.

His demand is unspoken but nonetheless powerful. He will be taken notice of. Daniel will listen to him.

“Sometimes you run so far and so fast that I almost start to believe you don’t want to be found. Almost.”

Does he? Does he want to be found? Sometimes, no. Sometimes he’s felt the safest in a Fresno flop house or Amsterdam bordello, red light winking at him through the vinyl slats, an unfriendly demon eye, haunting him like his own vision of the devil.

And sometimes - sometimes he’s slumped over a payphone, coins rattling like his fingers on his last pack of smokes, and he calls Armand to take him home.

And isn’t he here now? Didn’t he come? Daniel doesn’t recall the push and the pull, doesn’t remember where the knot of their tug-of-war finally crossed the mark. Armand finds him anyway, in the Waldorf-Astoria or slumming it on a bench in Hyde Park. And as far as he runs, doesn’t Daniel also let him?

“You think?” Daniel growls, scratchy-timbered and aching for a glass of water. But his hand finds its way to touch that cheek - so fucking glacial, his fingertips brushing against a cold steel hull, for all the perfect flesh didn’t give. A chill runs up his arm, to touch this thing looming over him. This beautiful, awful thing. He laughs, low and throaty. “Maybe I should buy a submarine.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

His beloved’s short-tempered quips might be more painful to hear, were it not for the fact that Armand knows (perhaps even better than Daniel himself does) just how besotted he is. Even were it not for the promise of the Blood, he knows that Daniel could not turn away from him now even if he so desperately wanted to. Their lives and fates have become so intertwined – after all, how could Daniel turn his back on the one person who understands him more than any other?

The reporter’s hoarse laugh has a wry, little smile blooming on Armand’s face all over again, the touch to his cheek pleasantly warm. He turns his head so that those brave fingertips catch just barely on the corner of his lips, dangerously close to teeth that could rip them off without hesitation. He wonders, if Daniel came face-to-face with a wild jaguar would he try to pet that, too?

“You know I could buy that for you too if you really wanted,” he husks against the prone fingers. “But wouldn’t you be terribly lonely all the way down there without me?”

With lazy, feline grace, he topples over, rolling across Daniel to tuck in against his side, writhing his way close beside the boy and resting his pretty, auburn head against Daniel’s shoulder, pressing so tightly against the inebriated young man that he has no choice but to pay notice.

“You could just love me instead, Daniel.”

It’s a strange kind of heaven they make together.

It takes no thought for Daniel to fold around the boy in his arms, to breathe in the copper curls, the slight body crushed, crushing - against him. Armand is so slender, so terribly, deceptively delicate. It’s almost a tragedy, the two of them embracing like this in the wan yellow light, midnight minutes ticking away like so many hours of his life.

“Of course I would.” Daniel murmurs into his hair. Muscles spasm at the corner of his lips, but it’s no smile. “I’d go crazy.”

His hand tremors.

“I would. I do. You don’t need to give me anything. Except the one thing you won’t.”

He regrets immediately, pang like a hot knife cutting through his gut. His stomach cramps, a shiver twisting through him as he swallows back bile. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, he wants to say. I didn’t mean it, he wants to confess, and hold that cool body closer against him. But he did mean it, all his wretched viciousness and bitter hooch breath. He meant it, like he meant it all those times before.

“So do it. Goddamnit, why won’t you do it?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

As quickly as he’s enveloped by the docile affections of his lover, they’re whisked away again as the age old argument once more raises its ugly head. He feels a strange, rather hollow sense of loss as the easy domestic bliss crumbles around them, Daniel’s hand shaking against him with all the bitterness and animosity that the young man can muster towards him.

Face betraying his disappointment, even though the regret underlying Daniel’s brash reaction is prominent against his mind, Armand pulls back, disentangles himself from the embrace as though it’s a punishment, sitting instead straight-backed against the headboard.

“I’ve told you so many times before, Daniel. The answer hasn’t changed. The answer will not change, regardless of how many times you ask me.”

Sad doe eyes glance reluctantly towards his companion, a frown disturbing the otherwise smooth flesh between his brows.

“I couldn’t bear to live with your eternal resentment, my love. Why can you not trust me when I tell you that this - whatever you think it is - is not what you want?”

If you loved me, you would not ask of me the one thing that I cannot give you.

“So you can bear to live with me dead? The fuck am I supposed to feel?” Daniel leans forward, coils of bedsprings protesting against the shift of weight. His feet swing over the side of the bed, barefoot on the whorls of carpet. His back is a faceless, unfriendly plane to Armand, slouched over his knees in as his head bows into his hands.

He can’t bear to look at Armand. He can’t bear that too-knowing, mournful look. Ages old.

“I’ve heard this before.”

From Armand, from Louis, too. It’s no gift, you don’t want this. But Daniel does want it. He can’t help but want it, this singing, killing blood in him. Only in drops! Agonizing, evil drops that Armand would dole out as he saw fit. And what did Armand care about agony it put him through? It’s a selfish, unjust thought. But he still thinks it.

That honeyed voice slithers into his mind, same as it always had. Daniel knows it so well now, he can hear it whispering things to him in the electric pulse of his brain, in the moments before sleep - in his dreams - in his nightmares - when he wakes. He hears it, knows its timbre, its faint accent and the way it sharpens when Armand feels pain, or rage, or the way he’s feeling right now.

“I’m tired.” He sighs. His body aches, and he’s dizzy even when he presses the palms of his hands to blackness against his eyes. And he’s tired of this fighting. Tired of hurting, tired of being hurt.

“I want to go home. Take me home, Armand.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

In an act of uncharacteristic vulnerability, Armand stays rooted to the spot, moving only to pull his knees upwards to his chest as though trying to make himself smaller, as though wishing he could disappear altogether. He feels chilled right through to his bones by Daniel’s bitterness, the hateful burning of tears already working behind his eyes.

“You don’t know what you are asking me for,” he hisses defensively, his whole posture mimicking that of a coiled viper. “You have so many beautiful years, Daniel, and you would squander them away to become… this!”

In one whip-quick, agitated movement, he gestures towards his own being with one hand before pulling it back in towards himself, covering the palms of his hands with his sleeves protectively.

“Death is better than this, believe me; I’ve seen both and I know which one I would choose - which one any of us would choose - if given my time again.”

Face pinched with pain, he drags his sleeve across his eyes briskly where vicious red begins to well up from his tear ducts, leaving coppery stains smeared across the white cable knit, the evidence of his shame. Truthfully, he can’t even think of turning Daniel, of making him cold and distant, his stomach twisting with some strange, foreign anxiety at the idea alone. He wants to obey Daniel’s wishes, to take him home and forget all of this nastiness, but he CAN’T, the atmosphere too oppressive, choking his voice as he forces it out.

“Don’t you think I realise the consequences of my choice?”

“God damn you!” He grates, suddenly explosive. He moves with combustive, kinetic energy, hand swinging like a mallet against the bedside radio, plastic pieces imploding with a clatter against his fist and falling with a muffled thump against the motel carpeting.

“How the hell can you be what you are and tell me you love me, you son of a bitch.” He rounds on Armand, rage whiting out the image of the huddled, wounded boy curling into himself on the ruined bedspread. “What kind of sick nerve you’ve got. Maybe it was better when you let me starve in that cesspit. At least I came to terms with croaking it. Now you’re killing the both of us. So do the fucking vampire bullshit already. Put me down like a dog. Is it better now, Armand? Is it really any fucking better? I don’t want any goddamn twilight years! I want all of it! I want to be with you!”

His face is feverish, wild and glistening. For all the unsteady, gut-roiling omen of his liver, Daniel holds his ground. He boils with blown-out pupils, sweat pricking at his temples and chest and the soft flesh under his arms. “I want the blood. I want it. What’s the point without it?”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

It’s impossible to suppress an overtly human flinch as the radio goes to pieces and he can’t help but stare at the action bitterly, desperately wanting to reciprocate. One small, white hand balls into a fist, desperate to lash out, but no matter how badly tempted he is, he won’t – he could never put Daniel in harm’s way and with his preternatural strength, there’s no promising his safety were Armand to lose his temper.

“Stop it! STOP IT!”

The hoarse cry boarders on a scream, both fists slamming down either side of him on the old, worn mattress, undoubtedly adding a few more broken springs to its collection.

“How could you do it to me? Why are you doing it to me?”

Staring up at his lover balefully, he can’t stand to hold his anguished stare for long, burying his blood-streaked face in both hands, unrestrained sobs wracking his body now. He isn’t sure what’s worse – Daniel’s rage or the incessant reminder that someday, Armand will have to let him go. He isn’t ready for it; he isn’t sure he’ll ever be ready for it. And as much as it breaks his heart, the thought of cursing him for all time is still inconceivably worse.

“Why isn’t this enough for you, just as things are? Am I not enough for you, Daniel?”

Even Daniel flinches, eyes shuttering like from the flash of a camera bulb. His head turns - involuntary - for only a split second, but he feels stung; wounded by Armand’s naked despair, wounded that even this isn’t enough.

His hands hurt - every fiber of him hurts - a live wire, raw and ragged and sparking. That’s Daniel Molloy, boy-reporter: a ruined man, shorting out and burning himself up from the inside. Is this enough for you? He thinks. Enjoy before your warranty expires.

“Stop it, Jesus, you’re gonna — ” Daniel grimaces, blinking away the sight of Armand on the bed like that, so fragile and so monstrous. He isn’t sure what he meant to say, what words died in his throat as he half looks away, embarassed and ashamed by the nakedness of feeling. "Don’t you dare ask me that. Don’t you fucking ask me that. It’s not the same.”

Light pulses behind his eyes, pulls on the nerves woven through the lattice of his skull like the fistful of a careless child, and he brings up a hand to squint away the pain.

Fuck. Fuck.

“This isn’t some ‘til-death-do you-part’ bullshit vow. Don’t you have any idea what it’s like?” Daniel leans into the pain - it’s pissing him off, sharpening the edge. He offered an out - he did. And he knows it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t real; it was just some half-assed excuse, too tired for this familiar old fight. But Armand wouldn’t let this of all things die, and Daniel found his second wind. “Don’t come at me with pretty words about mortality. I’ve heard it before, from you and Louis and Keats and Neruda and Shelley. It’s all the same.”

caravaggiovagabond‌:

After everything that he’s lived through, consensually or otherwise, Daniel is the only one who, in this day and age, could possibly rip such unfiltered feeling from him – intentionally or otherwise. The intensity of this - of what they are - has such a habit of racing from 0 to 100 in milliseconds; entwined as lovers one moment and a raging war the next. And for what? All because Armand loves him more than Daniel thinks, than Daniel could ever comprehend. Even wretched and enraged, Armand could never bear to part with this and trade it for some cold, dead imposter.

“Then why won’t you listen?” he begs. “Do you think that we all say it for the sake of our hea-ealth?”

His voice, though reedy and underdeveloped, has always been so clear. Now, it is broken with hiccuped sobs and jumping like a scratched record.

“Of course I know what it’s like, I’ve been on both sides, haven’t I? And believe me, I would take death first. I would take death one thousand times before this!”

If it was so simple, if he thought that he could live with himself for it, of course he would change Daniel. But he knows that to do so would be a date worse than death. All of it, from the process of creation itself to the loss of the very essence of Daniel’s humanity… he can’t. He curls in on himself, arms coming to wrap loosely around his torso as though trying to comfort himself, the fight suddenly seeming to drain out of him and leave him helpless instead. He wipes his sleeves across his face and then leaves his wrist there to cover his mouth, to stifle any further cries.

It’s so much easier to be angry. It’s easier when Armand is angry, too. But this - this wretched, hiccoughing misery - Daniel doesn’t know what to do with this. How small Armand looks, folding in on himself in a kind of helpless resignation. Armand - giving up ? - he doesn’t know what it is, but the wrongness of it makes him angry.

How’s this any better? Daniel thinks. Living off crank and cough syrup. Not eating, not sleeping. He hasn’t seen the sunlight in weeks. This isn’t being alive. This is barely being human.

Where the hell do we go from here? It’s as much a thought for himself as a challenge, bold-faced; direct - to Armand. Where the hell do we go?

Daniel stares at him, bleary-eyed, barefoot among the broken things.

“Quit it,” he says lowly. “C’mon, just — ” Just what? Now that’s bad writing, building the suspense without fulfillment. This makes for the shittiest story. Daniel has always loved speculative fiction; worlds parallel to their own, something just close enough to see the reflection of what you know. But something different, something bigger than the awful, looming monotony of an ordinary life. It had been so goddamn simple to transcribe Louis’ words, to insert himself only in the spaces left in-between. “The boy” wasn’t really him, wasn’t really Daniel so much as it had been the world. The audience’s oeuvre into this fucked up, violent, beautiful other life he had tumbled into.

But he’s living it now, or - living alongside it. That’s worse. To be so close to feel it and never to break inside. No matter how many times Daniel might beat his fists against the shell, no matter how it fractures - how Armand fractures - he can find no purchase. And each time, he finds himself slipping, loose and unstrung, falling deeper and deeper into the void. Don’t you see, Armand? One of these days, I’m not going to get out again.

He doesn’t want to write this story anymore. Not now, not that it’s his.

“Goddamn you. So just kill me already. You’re doing it anyway. God damn you.”

Daniel’s fists clench and unclench, casting long, distorted shadows in the shitty light of the flophouse room. He sits again on the bed with the creak of the cheap metal springs, hunched and sullen next to the figure of the wounded boy weeping silently beside him. Daniel says nothing else, staring hollowly at the stain in the peeling wallpaper, imagining it resolving into the shape of a long-legged insect with fractal wings and the smell of blood.